How To Create An Online Portfolio With WordPress (Complete Guide)

Many people use Instagram and other platforms to showcase their portfolio, but is this really the best way to showcase your work? Personally, I see it as a secondary channel, and to really showcase your work you should build your own portfolio site. This way you can have much better control over what it looks like and a much better platform to showcase your work without giving the rights to your work to some third party like Meta (Facebook / Instagram) or other platforms. So without further ado, let’s get started and build our portfolio site.

If you don’t have a WordPress site yet, consider grabbing the Elementor Cloud. Elementor Cloud Website is perfect for web creators who want to focus on building their professional website hassle-free. This end-to-end solution gives you everything you need in one place and is great value for money.

Things to consider before building your portfolio site

There are a few things you should consider before building your portfolio site. These include the theme you will be using and the builder. In our case we will be running you through both scenarios of using a page builder like Elementor and Gutenberg, so you can choose the one that fits your needs the best.

Selecting your theme

What is a theme? In short a theme is the blueprint of your site and determines the basic look and feel of your site. When selecting a theme for your portfolio site, you should consider the following:

1. Is the theme made for portfolio sites?
2. Does it support page builders?
3. Is the theme well supported?

If all three are checked then go ahead and select that theme. Our favorite themes for a portfolio site are Astra and Kadence themes or if you are going to use tools like Elementor, you can also use the Hello Elementor which is built by Elementor for Elementor. These three work great with Elementor or Gutenberg and can be used for many different kinds of sites. They are also well optimized regarding speed and search engines.

Selecting your page builder

A page builder when put simply is the tool that helps you build the site visually. Selecting the page builder you’re going to use for your portfolio is a bit trickier. Depending on your skills you might want to work with Gutenberg (WordPress’s default way of building sites) which is a visual builder though not the easiest to use. Or if you want something a bit more robust and easier to manage and even more visual then you might want to go with Elementor. If you don’t know which one to choose yet, don’t worry, we will walk you through using both so you can then decide which one to use after reading this guide.

What to include in a portfolio

What about things that you should include in your portfolio? Here are a few of our top pics to include in a portfolio:

• An easy way for potential customers or employers to contact you
• Show only a few pieces of your best work so you can show them more later on when asked.
• Try to keep your portfolio diverse yet unified so people can grasp your expertise easier but still see the difference between works
• Only showcase finished work or otherwise it might look like you tend to leave a job(s) unfinished

Building your portfolio page with Elementor

To get started with Elementor first install the Hello Elementor theme in your WordPress. This can be done by going to your “Appearance > Themes > Add New” and then searching for “Hello Elementor“.

After installing and activating Hello Elementor you should be prompted to install Elementor, but if not, head on to “Plugins > Add New” and search for “Elementor“.

We highly recommend getting Elementor Pro if you are going to use Elementor as your page builder because you get all the great features like the “Portfolio widget” from Elementor directly, making it so much easier to build an amazing portfolio website.

Creating portfolio page

Head on to pages and create a new page. After creating it select “Edit with Elementor” to start editing the page with Elementor.

You can use the “Portfolio” widget if you have purchased the Elementor Pro license to quickly build a portfolio that you like

Building your portfolio page with Gutenberg

When building a portfolio with Gutenberg you can either go with just simple image blocks or gallery blocks depending on what you want. Below you can see an example of three images in a gallery.

If you want something different you can always use the Kadence Blocks for example which allows you to create a gallery in the masonry and many other ways which helps a lot by making your portfolio a bit more interesting looking

You could also use the premade gallery templates. For more on how to build and use premade templates check our guide “How To Add Gallery To WordPress“.